Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She never called Kishibe “brother,” and he wasn’t one to her. What he was wasn’t a dog, either, not then. He was a human, and he was endlessly fascinating to her. The women at the meat markets, where she was born, would never talk to her in any form but ascetic prayers their grandmothers had taught them, and their grandmothers before that. It wasn’t verbiage comprehensible to a child, which she had been. For what was a child but someone whose eyes were completely open?

Kishibe was an atheist. He attended the rites his parents had taught him when he found the time or the energy, but it was hard to be as devout when his day job involved exterminating its objects of worship. And though he called them Devils, it was not because he was Christian—with time, Devils were what they simply had become.

“What do you believe in?” she said. She could recite prayers in any language she chose, even if she couldn’t understand them. At all times, someone somewhere was worshiping some Devil, and an animal blind to the meaning was watching from a nearby minaret, vault rib, or cage perch. 

The permanently-exhausted Devil Hunter did not care for her questions but entertained them anyway. “Whatever exists,” he said.

She hadn’t cut her hair since she’d been scouted from the meat markets, and now it fell a little past her shoulders. She carried with her, always, a small pink hairbrush she could fold and stuff into her pants pockets and take back out and unfold and rake through her thickening hair. She would do this on the days when they wouldn’t inject her with anything and her hands ached for something to snap in two. 

“Who do you trust?” she asked him, pulling the brush through her hair. The sift of keratin past the bristles made a soft staticky sound.

“No one,” he said.

“Who do you want to trust?”

His eyes flicked to the side, lizardlike. “Nobody,” he said, but she knew he was a liar. She knew he meant the sullen lady with white hair and a Devil heart that had become his new partner. He half-meant the short, snide kid he’d been toting around as a rookie to train. The kid was only a year or two older than Makima looked and hated to wear starched collared shirts with the top button fastened.

After they were introduced to each other for the first time, Kishibe disappeared into his office to draw plans with his partner, and the two teens were left in the foyer to idly swing their legs in office chairs. “Isamu,” she whispered, eyeing the tailfin of an inked carp that bled from underneath his popped-open collar. Most yakuza did not sell Philopon to minors, as part of their code of honor. But a code of honor never stopped them from giving her what she wanted. “Do you have any brothers?”

Isamu narrowed his eyes. His hands drifted behind his back. “Not anymore.”

“Ah,” she said. “So you don’t have a way out of here.”

“The pay ain’t anything to scoff at,” he replied. “And the Bureau protects its own. I don’t see myself leaving.”

“You don’t feel ashamed at leaving the family?” she asks. 

“I think…” He looked down and realized his avoidant posture. His hand came out of hiding. The end joints of two fingers were missing, those of his pinky and his ring finger. “If I’ve got to live in a world of bosses, a sense of loyalty will only get in my way. Has the good sensei told you this? Join whichever team is winning. We live as wolves.”

“Well,” she said. “I suppose you’re not one to trust, then.”

He smiled. He was missing a tooth, but the remaining ones were large and smooth. “Keep winning and you won’t have to worry.”

A week after meeting her for the first time, his bravado collapsed. He began to give her little things, taken out of what was left of the stash of money made from his yakuza stints. He bought her a Parisian-style parasol to prop upon her shoulder, citing that she was quite tan, and then a pair of white leather gloves. “Your fingernails are ugly,” he said. “Everyone can tell you were an addict.” He’d slipped the gloves onto her hands and then held them until they were both uncomfortable. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t mind that she was a Devil, it was more that he would often forget, what with her skin smelling faintly of milk, and the way that she was quiet, though not out of shyness like he thought, but of sight. She wondered if it was not also that she didn’t mind him, someone between civilian and criminal and unable to fit in either strata. The strata did not matter to her; a human was a human and they all mostly tasted the same… but vegetarians tasted sweeter, she'd found.

Kishibe disapproved. “Don’t use your Devil magic on my protégé,” he said. “We spent a lot of effort herding him away from the betting rings, and now you’re the one eating through his savings.”

“I’m not,” she protested, but it was no use. She didn’t like parasols. She didn’t even like wearing gloves. She preferred being able to feel textures in her hands. Every so often, she would find him asleep at his desk, face buried down in his elbow, and she would say “keep sleeping” (not knowing if it would work) and trace a finger down the nape of his neck, marveling at how similar the form of herself was to the form of him. The rhythm of hairs coalescing from skin was the same. She found different but familiar maps in the wrinkles of his knuckles. They were not two species—not really. She had the golden eyes of a crow and he had the flat, dark ones of a rat, but they were open and watching the same world. 

By working for humans who kill Devils, had she betrayed Devilkind? No. No longer did Devils feel allegiance to her, so she was similarly released from the binds of her ladyship. By contracting with a Devil, had Isamu betrayed humankind? Not at all. He was doing this to protect the people he loved, he said, which yakuza did before the war but Public Safety does now—his Chinese mother and grandfather, whom the small-town gangs would raise the protection fees for if they ever got close enough to him to hear their accented Japanese. 

She thought it had been to play for the winning team, but maybe she thought wrong. Maybe he said wrong. Maybe he lied.

Isamu died in a Devil attack. The metal appendages of the slag-beast had whipped toward Makima’s face and she had lurched back, but not quickly enough—Kishibe was not by her side, having been distracted by the Devil of Machines’ accomplice blocks away. So Makima said, before the wires sliced her skull in two, “Isamu!” and then Isamu gave both ears and a temporal lobe to his Devil of Traps, who shimmered up from the asphalt beneath Machine and opened its mouth, which was not more than a hole in the earth that drooled and laughed. Whirring and shrieking, Machine fell into it and it closed. Its smile left a fault line stretching three blocks wide.

When Kishibe returned, they sorted through piles of civilians to find Isamu. He was easy to spot because of the rivulets of blood that ran parallel down both sides of his neck, like the painted race cars in the magazines in his locker. Kishibe didn’t spare his body a second glance. He looked more annoyed than bereaved. 

“Do you… believe that how a dead body is prepared influences its previous occupant’s destination in the afterlife,” she said, “Master?”

Kishibe looked at her. “I’ll get in trouble if I let you eat him,” he said. “His family wants him cremated. But nice try.”

“Pity.” If she were a human, she would hold a feast instead of a conflagration. The thought of all those calories radiating out into the air, for nothing, helping no one, made her feel slightly ill. Not to mention the lost ephemerals that humans had forgotten they could gain by eating each other. There had been many things she knew Isamu indulged in—key among them a fantasy of protecting the weak—that she wanted for herself. When he was cremated, she squatted in the mind of a nearby horsefly and watched what she had hungered for become vapor in the fire.

Makima was brushing her hair again, which always seemed to put her in a contemplative mood. She turned from the little cushioned stool that was her perch in Kishibe’s office and asked Kishibe, “Are you sad about Isamu?”

He didn’t respond at first. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinted at the label on the manila folder in his hands. Makima watched him and strained to feel the semantics of her vocalizations slip into his ears like centipedes. But, as always, Kishibe’s mind was like a cold metal cube to her soft pink hands, utterly homogenous and betraying nothing in texture or transparency. She frowned and opened her mouth again.

“People die all the time,” Kishibe said, saving her from repeating herself. “It loses its charm after the first few times.”

“I know,” she said. In her training with Public Safety Devil experts, she had been learning to connect with eyes and ears all around the globe. The birth of humans was always the same, lots of shrieking, blood, feces, crying. Even though they outnumbered the deaths, the deaths were more memorable. Some were silent, others raucous, some precise and clean, some sluggish and wet. Once, for two weeks, she had been plagued every night by images of people dying in various ways. They weren’t images. She was watching them happen, dialing through them like the channels on Kishibe’s new color TV. Sometimes, when she was feeling bad, she would tune into the Death Channel and become submerged in an erasing sorrow that helped her feel functionally neutral about happenings. She told Kishibe about it now and he chuckled. 

“Is that funny?” she asked, genuinely.

“No, it isn’t. It’s quite sad.”

“Okay,” she said. “Are you really sad about it?”

“No.”

“That’s fair. But I’m sad about it. I wish no one had to die, ever.”

Kishibe looked as if he was holding something large in his mouth, and then he burst into loud, chaotic laughter. “You!” He slapped the folder down and jabbed a finger at her. “The Devil! You’re sad about human death.”

“I am.” He was starting to irk her. “What’s being a Devil got anything to do with it?”

“You killed Isamu! You told him to die when you knew he would listen! What a riot, and you'll say it isn’t true!” He got up and mussed up Makima’s freshly-brushed hair as he passed her. “I don’t hold it against you, Devil girl; I would've done the same. I’m gonna take a piss.” And then he left.

Makima set her brush down and thought about the back of Isamu’s head and felt a throbbing fullness to her tearducts. But then she opened her remote-viewing eyes and started watching people die again, and by the eighth death she didn’t want to cry anymore. She hadn’t told Isamu to die; she’d merely wanted to be saved. But who would believe her? Isamu was a cigarette-chewer, a leerer. He’d joined the yakuza and then left it, so he was double-dog destitute of honor. “Sacrifice” wasn’t in his lexicon. If he did die for some girl he fancied, he did it accidentally. 

And his family, what would become of them, with nobody to protect them now? Makima switched her channel to that of a bucket full of shrimp in his mother’s sink. She was washing a pot over the bucket, and the water poured over their heads. Tanned arms, she saw. A ring with a large, sparkling gemstone on her right middle finger, held deftly away from the suds—from Isamu’s blood money, likely. A pair of thinner arms with short, stubby hands plunged into the tub and began splashing and scooping up shrimp. Isamu did not tell her he had a younger sister.

Eyes squinted shut, she used a network of rats to track down every yakuza member in their vicinity. They congregated in the gambling parlors, in the brothels, in the radio stations and the izakayas. She watched for shortened pinky fingers and smelled for sooty skin; she became bedbugs underneath their shirts; she ruffled through registries as mice. It wasn’t precise, but it was all that she could think to do. Still half in Isamu’s hometown, she drifted up to Kishibe’s typewriter and plunked down characters. Toda Kenshin. Anzai Kichirou. Yamazaki Jurou. Anyone he would have known. Maybe he’d gone to grade school with some of them. Maybe, before he left, they would have considered him a friend, greedy Isamu, arrogant Isamu, Isamu who was a lightweight, Isamu with a beautiful singing voice he never used save for when he was alone and in a good mood, which, for extroverted, sour Isamu, was close to never. She collected all the names into a single sheet of paper to fold and stuff inside her pocket.

And then… “Trap Devil,” she said. “I know you’re not in your cell. Negotiate with me.”

From the floor morphed a puppy with bright eyes and big floppy ears. It yipped once and panted stupidly upon the floor, tongue lolling out. Not a single of spark of cognition lay behind in its gaze.

Makima crouched down and said, “The boy, did you care for him?” She dared not touch the puppy, even though she really wanted to.

Something above her laughed and drooled. “Charming, but, ultimately, bait. Keep one small fish alive to lure for you the big fish, no?” It was a cool, robotic voice laced with self-satisfaction. Makima knew better to look up, too. It would not have been polite.

“I suppose so.” She sat and watched the puppy chase its tail. “Then I can’t rally you with emotion alone.”

“Nor with authority, Conquest. Hell has been a senseless realm since you and your sisters capsized. All that’s left there is a power vacuum. No one lasts there for more than a day, so they’re all here on Earth now. Always wanted to know what you were thinking taking on the Hero.”

Makima laughed. Whenever she talked to other Devils, she felt her daily persona as a teenage girl melt from her mind, leaving it bare and cool in the air. She was thousands of years old again, tapping into a subterranean reservoir of memories that never happened. “I wanted to get on his radar.” 

“Oh, that boy, and now this boy… You made messes before, but now you’re—”

“This isn't that, though it would be entertaining—it's human gangs encroaching on Public Safety territory.” It was true that Public Safety and local yakuza were embroiled in a tense struggle over control of some prefectures, though, in her opinion, it was only a matter of time before Public Safety dominated the nation. 

“Pf!” A spray of spit misted the top of Makima’s head. “You care about these things? The Lady Lady’s doing menial work for a bunch of cattle in suits. Did not know you were the type to play pretend Devil Hunter! What a lovely game! A funny and delighting game!”

Makima wiped her head off and ignored Trap’s comment. “I want to know how they respond to stress. So I’ve got a hitlist. How many bodies for… let's start with forty kills?” she said. “Or do you want something more elusive? Souls? Memories?”

The puppy began rolling on the floor and whining. “Not a picky eater. Twenty-five bodies is sating, though prefer Devils, usually. Love the taste of fresh, warm lymph, don’t you?” A glob of drool fell beside Makima’s chair, narrowly missing her arm. 

“I don’t hunger.”

“Lies and lies. Anyway, need you to ensure Public Safety leaves me alone for this. That… don't know what to call it. The one with Crossbow’s heart.”

“It goes by Quanxi.” 

“Don't wish for it to look at me. …So, contract.”

“Yes, contract.” Makima stood. “I'll make something up. That's all, now. Don't let me keep you here.”

There was the moist sound of a mouth slapping closed above her. The puppy froze and whimpered fearfully before its structure loosened and it became sludge. The floor absorbed it wholly—then spat it back out.

“Wait, Conquest,” the voice above her head whispered. 

“Yes?”

“When will you return to ladyship?”

“I…” She stared at the puddle of puppy goo on the ground that was fur and little white bones floating in a soup of blood.

“Suppose Isamu was charming. After Public Safety nabbed him, it could only be strictly contractual, tit for tat, between us. And before that, primarily only engaged with him to stalk the Devils that had dealings with the gangs. But for a while, then… his company was not so horrible, for a human. Wish I didn’t have to eat him. Under different circumstances, wouldn’t have had to eat him at all as Machine was very delicious. But had to upsell him, or…”

“You would have ended up like Fox Devil. Paid in scraps.”

“Aye.”

An expression of vulnerability. Uncanny. Did Makima hate the Trap Devil for eating Isamu? Likely not. After all, it was contractually bound. Public Safety did not let Devils and humans help each other for free or under loose expectations of reciprocity. They’d said it was difficult to enforce and opened the stage to power plays, ulterior motives, and dupes. Under the contractual model, enabled by allying with the Devil of Fate, each agreement was just that: an agreement. It could be recorded and filed away. It could be submitted as evidence to a court. It could be workshopped by the Bureau’s new division of lawyer-like contract negotiators, who haggled with Devils in secret currencies beyond eyeballs and fingernails. So law-abiding Devil interactions had to come to this, Makima supposed. 

“Fate is a cruel bitch, isn’t she?” Trap said. “Cruel and smart, but not as smart as you. Not as powerful. She can never be a Horseman like you and your sisters were.”

“Mn.” Noncommittal. She’s not prideful enough to fall for flattery.

“I know you know the way things go,” Trap spoke. “Forget Fate. Forget the humans. When you’re done playing this silly game, I’ll follow you back home, and so will everyone else. You don’t need to cast your lot with Earth, fair Lady, not when Hell is yours for the taking.” The furry sludge seeped into the floor and didn't return.

Kishibe shambled back into the office, buttoning his fly. “What are you standing there for?” he asked Makima. “Why is there a wet spot on my carpet?” Without waiting for her answer, he said, “Gah, I’ve decided. I’m headed out to the bar—no use whilin’ about while that damned psychotherapist keeps me off the rotation. You’re coming with me and Quanxi. It’s about time the two of you became acquainted.”

She said nothing and stepped back to let him fall into his seat. After the talk with Trap, it felt as if she had shifted back into her original nature, a being older than language with bones of old-growth wood—and Kishibe was only a small mammal that made his nest in it, so small he did not believe he was living upon a tree instead of solid earth, so high above he could not see it. Isamu was a dead mammal, as mammals often are—always are, given enough time. So they were not worth tears. She could not talk at length with Trap about these things because it was opportunistic and weaponized all information given to it, especially admissions of weakness. Even if it had sympathized with her on the matter of Isamu, it was only to goad her toward its goals, which she assumed included occupying Hell without the threat of death. Such was the case with smaller Devils, whose only concerns were becoming larger nowadays. They were good companions but only so long as they were fed.

Tonight, however… it seemed she would be face-to-face with her old adversary Crossbow, or at least its holding vessel. How much of Crossbow could bubble up through Quanxi’s skin? What would be the point of talking to Crossbow? To remember herself. That she was not only Makima but Conquest, a once-Lady of Hell, the Lawbringer, the First Horseman. And she was only to be Makima while she grieved her loss at the hands of the Hero of Hell. And she was only to grieve the deaths of livestock while she was Makima. Was that right? She wanted to stop hurting. When she had been Lady of Hell, nothing hurt at all. Perhaps she should go back.

“That’s a creepy face you’re making,” Kishibe muttered.

“Hm?”

“I haven’t seen you make that face in a while,” he said. "It makes you look like a ventriloquist's dummy."

“Is that so,” Makima said. She wore her face upon her skull like she wore the skin on her arms, as only humans communicated with their faces. A Devil would smell her intentions and understand.

Chapter Text

When they walked down the street, Kishibe would offer his arm to her. She would bury her fingers into the heavy folds of his smoky greatcoat and feel the sway of his gait in his elbow. It made her feel like a lady, which she was, now looking the part with the white gloves she was loath to remove and the parasol snapped into the crook of her neck. 

People have a certain malleability to them, she thought, that makes them unpredictably impermanent. A dead human was the loss of a live one. An old human was the loss of a young one. They became different, alien entities far too easily. The gloves, in comparison, could become stained with all sorts of fluid, the ripples of the white leather creased and peeling, the seams at the wrists coming loose, and they would still be gloves. 

Humans, not so much. She had already lost the first Kishibe she knew, and now she was onto the second. This Kishibe was quieter and more handsome, in her opinion. The depths under his eyes added to the dimensionality of his face, gave it shadows that otherwise would have been airbrushed onto a magazine model. When he moved into a crowd, people gave him space. When she held onto his arm, nothing and nobody brushed past the hem of her culottes. He also no longer found her as amusing. Not that being amusing ever particularly mattered to her.

If she was the mallet, then she should find a life of constancy in objects. Every day, the feel of the white lace of her blouse against her skin was the same—and if it were different, it would mean she had changed, and not the shirt. Every morning, she drank a cup of tea with two sugar cubes in it and no milk. Though each tea bag is not the same as the last, the tea is the same. The sugar is the same. The taste of the steep, earthy and acidic, was unchanging.

If she was the mallet, could she make the taste of humans the same? Even if each human was not the same as the rest, perhaps she could consider the indents of them in the world identical, just as different tea tasted like the same tea. 

On the walk to the pub, she looked up at Kishibe. He hadn’t shaved for three days but no one at the Bureau cared. His stray whiskers were coarse and wiry and stuck out of his chin like grave markers. If he was gone, how easily could she fill the indent of him with someone else?

The answer was very easily. There were a thousand men like him haunting the ramen booths late at night, eating alone, broth slicking their despairing chins. If she needed someone to scoff and belch at her in the same breath, it would be perhaps the easiest pickings of any type of person in the city. But, unlike those men, Kishibe tended to be disorientingly hard to get rid of, unresponsive to evictions and death, so she was stuck with him.

“Master,” she said, solemnly.

“Ngh,” he responded.

“Do you think you’ll have a son?” she said.

A wave of old bitterness swept through his features. His mouth tightened, and for a moment she thought that he was done entertaining her questions. But she suspected his rage was not so much at her, but at himself, his father, and his brief, frigid childhood in the North.  “Hell no,” he said, quietly. “I'd fuck him up.”

Makima nodded empathetically. “I couldn’t be a mother.”

“Ah, don’t say that,” Kishibe said. 

“For one, I’m a Devil. But even if I were a human—”

“That’d be a question to answer a decade from now. Don’t girls your age have anything better to think about?”

“My age? Oh, no. There are no girls my age. You forget I’m very old.” She didn’t like that he tended to consider her as a Devil when she was feeling human and a human when she was feeling Devilish. “Though, if I wanted to be a mother… to something. To be able to be a mother… I would rebirth.” 

“Careful,” he said, guiding her away from a gleaming puddle on the sidewalk. Her ballet flats barely dampened in its edges. “Rebirth?”

“The core of every iteration of a Devil is constant,” she spoke. She recalled images of lost scriptures in forgotten language and picked out the lines she thought would be the least risky for Kishibe to know. “But the details vary, usually to reflect the changing times. When we die on Earth, we spawn in Hell. When we die in Hell, we spawn on Earth, reborn—this is when updates to form and function occur and all memories of previous lives are erased. That way, Devils are dealt a hand suitable to their associated fear in the global human zeitgeist. As I have lived, I cannot act as a mother. In another life, perhaps. As a new person.”

“You don’t think…” Kishibe started, and then hesitated. He licked his chapped lips and made an abrasive noise with his throat. “...The life you come to live in the future can change that? Change you?”

Oh, so he was fully sober! Just the slightest tinge of inebriation would have turned his tongue too cynical to voice that thought. “I have no desire to shape anything. I have no desire to create anything.”

“Eh, likely for the better,” he mumbled mostly beneath his breath.

“Precisely for the better,” she recited, voice cutting clear and light through the air.

“Then what do you want?” he asked.

“Devils do not desire as urgently as humans do, because Devils do not die as humans do. We desire like beasts do, because beasts are not aware of their mortality, and Devils simply do not experience it. So I don’t want anything like you would want. I have an eternity to acquire anything. Though, if you ask me what I plan to do, it is to let nature take its course.”

Kishibe stopped suddenly. Makima would have lost her balance if she had not been consciously syncing her footsteps with his. She quietly stopped when he did and looked up at him. He was smiling but it wasn’t warm; it looked sickly upon him, like a corpse’s grimace. “You’re lying to me again,” he said. “You may be the cleverest Devil on Earth, but even you can’t fool me.”

She could say nothing to that. She leaned her cheek to his arm and nudged him forward. He was as warm as the day she met him and she wished, dimly, as beasts wish, that he would carry her again. 

It was a bright and early autumn afternoon, and though the streets in the administrative quarter were sparsely populated, their regular pacers had merely been sucked up into the glass-front buildings above to release once more in two hours. “Master,” she said. The Hunter bar was a street or two away, and she was running out of time to ask him anything and not have the drink answer. 

“Hm?”

She didn’t know what she wanted to say, so she decided to act consistently, at least, and live as a beast would, which was to do as she dimly desired. She squeezed his elbow, then dropped her hand towards his. “Hold my hand.” She sometimes commanded this of him, if not to carry her, and he found it funny to indulge her and put on an act with her. People found Kishibe and Makima intrinsically unnerving by themselves—no matter how beautiful they were, it was clear they did not walk the civilian plane—but together, if they pretended to be siblings, or close cousins, or dear childhood friends who had moved to Tokyo from the same small town, they were quite the charming pair!

But this time, Kishibe shook her off. Makima watched him placidly, then floated her hand down to her side. “You’re not a kid,” he said. It was strange that he sounded so hateful when it was widely known that Devils didn’t have a juvenile form. “No kid knows the things you know or says the things you say. No kid does the things you do.” The last part he spat like a condemnation.

She pouted. “So you’ll finally let me drink?”

“Do whatever,” he said. “Fuck it. You could be a million years old. And I don’t care. I’m not responsible for you. Stop doing the little brat voice, too, it’s damn creepy.”

She drew herself up and her shoulders back. A distance bobbed into existence between their matching strides. “Fine,” she said in the pillow-soft, ageless coo she used with other Devils. “If that’s what you’d like, then I’m happy to oblige.” Kishibe wrinkled his nose but didn’t comment. It made her so sad to use that voice with him, and she didn’t know why. When she spoke with it, it sounded, even to herself, as if it were coming from far, far away. A voice suitable for a new god.

She glanced at his hand. The dark hairs on the wrist lay flush and relaxed against skin which did not glisten with sweat. At least there was that. What did she want?

They approached the bar. Leaning in the shade in front of the door, the silhouette of a tall, muscular woman condensed from the dark, a long cigarette extending from her fingers.  After a sweep of her eye up and down Kishibe, no doubt looking for symptoms of internal haggardness, she slipped into the cavernous interior, smoke twisting in her wake like wisps of history.

“Thanks,” he mumbled to her, catching the door as it closed. Mercifully, she had postponed their greeting ritual. He was in no state to be clobbered.

Devils on Earth dream of Hell and forget their dreams soon after waking. The echoes of their core have no scaffolding in the brain and so crumble as soon as they sound. To many Devils now, Hell was a nightmare, though the dreams were, to the older few, the only chance to return fleetingly to a home that no longer was. Makima remembered centuries of Hell, but she didn’t dream of it once. Perhaps her core was satisfied with merely remembering it. 

She dreamed of other things, though. She dreamed of tracking down Kishibe’s father in the North, who had taught him to hunt, and then hunting him. She dreamed of the teacher that had made a mockery of Isamu in high school, and she dreamed of teaching him the infernal truth about the eight planes of the world, then letting him loose as a newborn lunatic. Kishibe told her she often slept like a cat, smiling smugly, and these dreams must have been why. If she had claws, she would have flexed them into the air, purring as she dreamed.

Though she dreamed of their peripherals most often, it was not never that she dreamed of Kishibe or Isamu themselves. She dreamed many times about leveling a rifle to her shoulder and sending shots through a snow plain, their booms muffled by her winter hat. A bear in the sights, like a dark mountain unearthing itself from the white. Two spots of human warmth to her left and to her right. 

To her left, Isamu grows impatient and shoots before thinking. A spew of red jets from the bear’s neck. It rears, howling. Makima holds her breath and steadies the barrel. She waits for a shot to sound from her right, and then realizes that Kishibe is watching her, breath held, waiting for her to shoot instead, and so she tosses her mind’s eye above to swivel around the trajectory of the gun, tracing it into its final destination through the bear’s black eye. She pulls the trigger. The gun sounds. The bear doesn’t. The snow silences its fall. It becomes a still mountain emergent from the plain, but no longer emerging.

She’s smiling; everyone’s smiling after. Kishibe smooths down her hat as he passes her. Isamu bounds through the snow to the carcass and jams his freezing fingers into its hot mouth. The three of them drag the body onto a tarpaulin and up the hill to their cabin. While Kishibe lights the gas heater and Isamu sharpens the carving knife, Makima draws herself into the tiny washroom to dip her hands in warm water. The world enclosed in the washroom is brown and small, illuminated in orange light by a camping lantern hanging from a hook by the mirror. Inevitably, she looks up from her snow-blushed fingertips into her reflection.

Her eyes are glossy and black. Her eyes are those of the bear. Her eyes are those of Kishibe and Isamu. She sees her eyes as she sees their eyes, through the iron sights of the hunting rifle. They are the same eyes because she cannot recognize faces; she recognizes scents. But few do retain their sense of smell in a dream. She sees her eyes from those of the bear, across the snow plain as those of a little red-capped figure crouched behind a boulder, a glint of gunmetal flashing from just above it. A startling recognition that it’s too late now, no more foraging, no more bathing in rivers, no more growing heavy with cubs, no more waking from long sleeps, no more sniffing the empty miasmas of spring air, no more time. No more. A swift death by bullet, immediately after. Darkness. 

But not quite oblivion. In the dark, the wet crunching of a female Devil eating herself. Forever, the patterns of squelching morphing to resemble human speech cadences with each passing eternity. No gunshots to end it, this time; this was already death. This was all she could never know. This was all that she knew.

She woke up sweating, having dreamt of hell. Always tangled in one of Kishibe’s stinky blankets on Kishibe’s stinky couch, while Kishibe’s new color TV played black-and-white footage of the American moon landing over and over. 

“—read the plaque that's on the front landing gear of this LM. First there's two hemispheres, one showing each of the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says ‘Here Man from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ It has the crew members' signatures and the signature of the President of the United States. Ready for the camera? I can—”

The bars in the administrative quarter that weren't izakayas and didn’t serve cocktails to Tokyo’s government yuppies tended to be divey cop bars or cop-turned-Hunter bars. Similar skillset, higher pay, and the local police forces were grateful to unload those of their rank, who, frankly, shouldn’t be cops, to Devil Hunter agencies. Though those establishments hosted most pro Devil Hunters, Kishibe frequented the one bohemian bin in the area that had also become slowly overrun by Devil Hunters. The crowd it gathered emanated the stink of having run left of its own plans. Lots of would’vers . Would’ve gone into the metalworking trade if I hadn’t lost my right hand to gray water; would’ve graduated college if naval police hadn't caught me fencing molecules across the South China Sea; would’ve found another job in the mines by now if I’d just scabbed at Miike. But I would never have. I couldn’t have not. So it goes.

Whatever the story, the incontrovertible reality was that they were now a Devil Hunter, public or private, licensed or shadow. Kishibe liked it, Makima supposed, because he was a man of buried would’ves himself and because he didn’t want to risk taking Makima to one of the more central Hunter bars, where she’d be instantly recognized and killed by anyone contracted with a Devil for its sense of smell.

There was also the matter of Quanxi, who stank more strongly of Devil than even herself. She’d leaned herself by the bar and was rattling off her and Kishibe’s drink orders. A heavy fog smelling of wet metal tumbled from the nape of her neck and beneath her muscle shirt. 

Makima rolled her long socks down to her ankles as she stepped into the building. The stitches had left red indents on her calves. 

Because of the erratic hours worked by many Hunters, the bar wasn’t completely empty even at this hour. She trotted after Kishibe, who tossed his coat onto a tree that creaked with its weight. He didn’t spare her a glance as he pivoted toward the barstool next to Quanxi’s seat. 

Makima hopped onto the seat next to him. The bartender nodded at her but didn’t ask for age verification. His hair was short and curly and sliced in two not by a part but by a long scar stretching back from the temple. She pointed to one of the taps. A beer. Yes, I’m sure. That’s all, thank you. Any one is fine. Yeah, that one is good. I’m on his tab, as usual. The little waves and shortcut gestures she’s seen Kishibe do.

The bartender was often chatty with Kishibe, but Makima held the suspicion that he had been instructed—not sure when, not sure by whom—not to engage her in the same gregariousness, though he was always polite.

After they had gotten their orders, they were silent. Makima sipped her drink, which lightly sweated into her hand. She liked the way the froth swallowed her upper lip. She felt Quanxi’s single eye appraise her, tracing the borders of her form against the haze of the bar. Makima dragged a napkin neatly across her lip, put it down, and turned to meet Quanxi’s eye. 

It was dead, or approaching dead, like the eye of a fish on ice at the harbor markets. It was not that it was sunken, or that its white was yellow. Those were the tells in Kishibe’s ancient eyes that spoke of long nights and impending liver disease. But Quanxi’s eye was smooth and evenly-colored. It looked merely as if it had never seen light. Makima smiled slightly at her, deciding she liked the look of it. Quanxi didn’t smile back, but her gaze softened. She put her chin on her hand. Between them, Kishibe made horselike sounds into his glass until he slammed it down, shaking his face. “Another!” he called to the bartender. Already, he was too loud for the small and sparsely-populated dive.

A slight motion—Quanxi had tipped her head toward Kishibe. Her eye briefly paused on his shoulder, then returned. This oaf, she meant. How drunk does he need to be to introduce us to each other?

Makima elevated the left corner of her mouth by a few degrees and shook her head. By the time he’s done, it seems he might try to introduce himself to us. You know how he is.

Ah, yes. A purse of her lips. God's blight upon Devil women. He'll never change. Quanxi sipped on her cocktail and thought, staring straight ahead. When she turned back, it was to jerk her chin at Makima and raise her eyebrow at her drink. You look different, somehow.

Makima looked down into her pint of beer and smiled. Her golden reflection was perfectly symmetrical. He won’t let me wear black yet. This is the best I can do. An inhale, a opening of her posture toward Quanxi, wide-eyed eye contact. Is it alright if we talk? A darting of eyes toward the passage curving behind the bar counter. Privately.

Quanxi nodded, mechanical, a strand of her piecey white hair falling down in between her eyes. Gotcha. I’m ears. “I’m going to the washroom,” she told Kishibe, sliding out of her seat. 

“Oh, please excuse me as well,” said Makima. “Could you watch our drinks for us?”

“Huh?” he said. “Hey, there’s only one…” But he had been tasked with the weighty onus of keeping an eye on the women’s drinks, so he stayed, muttering bitterly under his breath. Makima stole another glance at him before she tailed Quanxi into the women’s washroom. He was tilting his head side to side, as if it would accelerate the speed at which alcohol seeped into his brain.

The door swung closed behind Makima. She locked it. Already, a freshly-lit cigarette tusked from Quanxi’s thin mouth and dripped its smoke into the powdered-violet perfume of the washroom. She leaned back onto the ledge of the sink and tapped out a second cigarette. Backglow from the vanity lights ringing the mirror above the sink cast the pale flyaways around her head in stone. Makima wanted to check her reflection, to decide how she should act according to her visual effect, but Quanxi’s squarish, tall frame blocked off all but the top corners of the mirror. Her eye was flat and dead as she held the cigarette out to Makima.

“Ah! I’ve never smoked,” Makima said, which was a true but useless thing to say. She took the cigarette anyway, reasoning that only camaraderie would come of it. She stuck it in her mouth, leaned forward, and let Quanxi light it for her. Frowning, she inhaled—thick soot filled her sinuses. She spewed and hocked the plumes out until she was drawing in smooth breaths of relatively clear air. “Ugh.” Tears burned in her eyes. Was her face burning, too?

Above her, Quanxi’s face held a small smile of amusement. “It’s not for everyone,” she said, extending her hand again. Makima divested the responsibility of the cigarette onto her, and she put it out along the rim of the sink. “But I’m surprised it was your first. The bosses put you at four hundred years.”

“Four hundred years in Hell, where there is no such thing as a cigarette.” Once she recomposed herself, she put her hands behind her back and stood with her heels touching, hovering just away from the tiled wall. “No trees, no paper. We wrote correspondences on our own keratin molts. You remember, don’t you?”

“Remember?” Quanxi echoed.

“Crossbow, then.”

Her face hardened. “Hearts don’t talk.” Her eye roamed the little washroom, taking in the grime in the corners and along the floor and the warm light that made it seem like fur. “It's not just the cigarette, then. Lots must be new to you.”

“Just about everything,” Makima said. “Buttered toast, subway stations, late-night talk shows, ice cubes, lipstick, melon soda, baseball, samurai films, telephone booths…” She put a finger to her lips in thought. “And I’m getting quite good at sudoku puzzles lately.” She couldn’t keep a note of pride from stowing away in her voice.

“I see. Crossbow’s curious about that.” Quanxi opened her mouth, tasting her explanation before she uttered it. “She doesn’t speak, but I can feel what she wants.”

“Crossbow is… curious about sudoku?”

“Your dealings as a Devil in a human body. There’s also animosity, a little bit. Resignation. Nostalgia. Respect. You were adversaries?”

“I care nothing for what occurred and hold no grudge,” said Makima. “Now that I live a passably human life…”

Quanxi nodded, surprised. “So that's the feeling, then. The Devils I hunt ask questions meant for her that I can't answer. Dominions and allegiances and all that. I don’t know what it all means, but I get it—because she gets it. And she thinks it’s stupid.” Her eye narrowed and flickered from left to right. “Now all she cares about is wearing leather jackets and watching Columbo . I don’t even know if I like Columbo , but, hey, I’m happy when she’s happy. Because she's my heart.”

“That’s funny. Traditionally, satiety is the desire of Devils. A full belly, you see, an expansive dominion. Happiness is alien to us.”

“Satiety, huh.” Quanxi turned and tapped her cigarette ashes into the sink. “I like to believe that, on Earth and as my heart, it’s possible for Crossbow to be happy, not just sated.”

“It’s a beautiful thing to believe,” Makima sighed, “And I believe it too. It’s a pity there is no buttered toast in Hell. Then perhaps I could stand taking it back.” 

“It’s a pity there are no humans in Hell to make buttered toast.”

Makima tilted her head. “It’s a pity there are no Devils on Earth to eat buttered toast.”

“It’s a pity that Devils on Earth eat humans who make buttered toast. Instead of the buttered toast,” Quanxi said, leaning in.

Makima leaned in as well. Her voice dropped to a murmur. “It’s a pity that Devils on Earth die before they try buttered toast.”

Makima looked at Quanxi, and Quanxi looked at Makima. The words that they had spoken at each other wove a swirling electric column in the air. “Word is you aren’t an assimilationist.” she whispered, cigarette clutched close to her lips as if to guard them. “So what do you envision?” She was breathing shallowly. The air at the tip of Makima’s nose wobbled with the rhythm of her breaths, whose smoke contained layered notes of wax and machine lubricant.

“I envision nothing,” said Makima, and she wasn’t lying. She knew this because her breaths were shallow too. “I have no great plans but to mourn and to be happy with my body, while it’s mine. To feel human… to act on human emotions. In this life, I’ve been blessed with the knowledge of a great big secret.”

Quanxi’s eyes narrowed, and her lips firmed into a straight line. “I see. You don’t have to worry about me, you know? I have no other allies. Not on this front. Not for lack of trying.” The cigarette dents ever so slightly in her grip. “I’ve been waiting to be understood, but being feared is all anyone understands.”

“Being feared is all that Devils can understand. You and I look just about human. Do you remember how Crossbow looked before she was your heart?”

“She was drying out on the sandbanks. The gulls were picking at her. I thought she was a sea urchin.” She blinked. “Is it really that, or us? Are there really only two ways to live on Earth? No… there’s also what Fate is.”

Makima frowned and drew away. At the mention of Fate, a coldness shot up her spine, and the scent of living, twisting smoke turned into the scent of dead ashes. It seemed that all on Earth knew Fate, even those who had forgotten Hell. Whereas Fate, who had not stepped foot in Hell for two thousand years, had all but vanished from the minds of good society up above. Makima didn't like not knowing, but she didn't not like it to the point of fearing it.

Quanxi, misinterpreting Makima’s frown as fatigue, rose from her lean and put her cigarette out. She adjusted her belt against her pelvis and turned toward the restroom door. “Well, if you change your mind, and remember your vision—”

“I reiterate that I have no vision. It's my opinion that there is no hope of uniting humans and devils as equals. I can’t tell you how many have tried only to be forgotten. The situation always reaches a point of irreparability—always. The world is left worse than how they found it. So I’m afraid you have no allies at all in this matter, likely not even in Crossbow. Now, I don’t wish to leave poor master alone out there.” She slid past Quanxi and palmed open the door. 

"Too late."

They found that their drinks were still there, but Kishibe was gone. Makima sniffed for him, but all humans bathe so frequently that they smell too similar to other humans to track. He was, however, certainly no longer within the premises of the bar. His seat was cold and his tab paid, his greatcoat gone from the rack.

“Oh, him? He got into a car with a cohort of private sector Hunters,” the bartender said. “Bounty Brothers. Didn’t seem to be too drunk, at least by his standards.”

“Got it.” Quanxi tipped him. She retrieved her scabbard carrier from the base of the coat-tree and clipped it onto the back of her waistband, and then handed Makima her little white coat. “He’s a workaholic,” she told Makima. “He’s probably gone on a hunt with them.”

“Are you worried about him?” said Makima.

“Not at all,” she said. “But I’ve got orders.” She tossed Makima a pointed look. “Where is he?”

Makima shrugged. “I’ll call him—”

“Control,” Quanxi asked again. “He won’t pick up. Where is he?”

“Alright. If I must.“ Makima sighed and closed her eyes. All of Tokyo rose from the darkness of her eyelids like a grid, pulsating with the light of thousands of tiny neural ganglia. She searched for his voice among millions—felt with her body the faint ping of recognition a cockroach in the trunk of a beat-up sedan didn’t know why it had. “He’s moving north into Ueno, east of the zoo, passing its latitude five minutes.”

Then, she opened her eyes. Quanxi was giving her, once again, a strange dead look that would have paired well with the night wind. It was uncanny in early afternoon sunlight. “I can’t leave you here,” she said. “But—”

“I can wait for you two back in the bar, really, I was having a fine time,” Makima assured. She kept an eye on the street to scan for oncoming cabs, but none seeped in from the end of the street. “I understand my presence complicates things.”

“It’s not that,” Quanxi’s face didn’t move. “You can’t be left alone. Just promise me something. Don’t speak. Don’t call for help. Don’t scream. Not a sound out of your mouth starting now, and do as I tell you—there are people that've become very interested in how you act and what you say. That’s all I know.”

Makima nodded. She turned her head toward the end of the road. A few cars stuttered toward and away from them, but still no cabs to wave down. Quanxi squinted in that direction as well, then looked back, confused. 

“Ah, a cab will be too slow,” said Quanxi. “You don’t mind being carried, do you?”